Three Poems by Annie Virginia

The Sound of Roots

We come from the mountains, we have wolfin our blood, we have pinebarb. It is our cabinteeth,we have shotguncousins and dirtdress babiesand when they holler pitchblack in the woods, their mawsare filled with broken knuckles. There are Mason ringsin their molars. We have sold our teeth for tar.

There is a snaggletooth in my eardrum. It belongsto my greatgreatgrandmothers, who mixed scratchwith driedblood blessings and tried to stickEucharists to the ribs of their floursack children.This is why we all grew up plump, this is whyI vomit out back behind the shed– so my mothercan remember the birchbranch ribs of her baby sisterwho too often got caught in her father’s beartrapteeth, his flyhook hands. Seventeen years beforeshe would beartrap a bullet into her clutteredcabin throat.

I’m sorry, mama, but some of her teethgot splintered into the walls of my room,they are the bones in my ears.I used to believe my musclememorywas learned through this gracelaced hammer,all mine, each curse a carving in my bedposts.But even this bed is hers and my armored shouldershave hung in our women’s closets for centuries, twitchingat the slamming of doors. They are quilts lain overloveletterless chests and beaten in the winter to releasethe dust, then draped over our daughters as if to burythem in mountain snow.

But we are not as clean as moonshine.When the folks in town spit our name,it is a tooth punched from their gums by whispers.Gapped sneers are clan insignia of riflerousersdrinking to the impact of recoil and the cum of myths.

So our fence is bricked with canines and we pierceour daughters’ ears with incisors. Only the wolfboys comehowling. Out back behind the cabin’s neck, there is a plotof gunpowder earth and like damning a newborn’s nameinto our family bible, we are each to lay a tooth into a time capsule.

Words of a Brier-Switch Man, Elbow-Deep in a Busted Old Soda Machine1

Morganton, North Carolina, 2010

Jes lak a woh-man. Takes n it don’t give nuthin’ bek.

Hehe.

Cain’t take a joke no more huh missy?

All y’all wimin cain’t take a joke these days.

Betchya don’t want me to hold this door for ya neither huh?

Bet I know sumthin’ ya would lak me to hold.

Hehehe.

Naw baby I’m jes playin’ witchya.

Don’t you pay me no mind.

I jes ain’t seen nobody as purty as you since mama gone home with the Lord.

1The Anthropologist, on the Brier-Switch Man

Down the long dirt road is a Christmas tree stand, then just leaves and the farm supply store, full of empty metal space and the smell of horses. The kind of place where the lighting is always right, but for what. It is best to leave as soon as possible. The machine is the faded red only found in towns where the reconstruction didn’t catch on, some confederate ghost still trying at passion. Anything left in it is sticky dust in Mountain-Mist cans, thinned enough to bend under fingers. The man digging up into it is rangy, missing teeth, and ruddied cheeks show under a set-in grime that makes his face look like a rag that’s blackened no matter the washes. I wonder what he is thirsty for. If his nails or the machine or his ideology are dirtier. Who owns the dirt, owned it first. When he speaks, my canary murmurs but does not sing. I am heavy from the soft violences handed to me by men who were born weapons and have rusted. This one sees me and mistakes me for the machine. There is some old red in me that stirs the iron in his mouth. Like a good dog with rabies, he is dangerous. So is empathy. The pines stand sentinel, but for whom. They can’t speak up, they lean away, cast shade over the road.

Beastlight

Since the startle-shaped animals no longer passin front of my car in the only light for miles,since I don’t drive through back roads anymore,since I forgot the sasquatch mysteryof the creature who ran through my headlightsand I no longer search for it or try to name it,my skin no longer smells like stars,is not so bright with lake water.

In the back porch of my eye the animalmoved. There was a pink and green moththat rested on the wood of the kitchen in daysand came to crawl between my fingers by flashlightin the nights. I was never scared I would hurt it.With sticks I moved the body of the porcupinefrom the road where it looked like it was resting.A whole half of it was unspoiled but it fell awayfrom itself when I lifted it. There are graveyardsalongside the smallest, most isolated roads there.It has been years since I buried a bottle in the woodsbeside that homemade cemetery.It has been years since I retrieved it.

Annie Virginia has her BA in poetry from Sarah Lawrence College. She transitioned out of her role as a high school English and Creative Writing teacher in order to pursue her MFA. Currently, she is working as a Community Educator, teaching relationship abuse prevention to middle schoolers. Annie Virginia’s work may be found in The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature, The Legendary, The Literary Bohemian, Cactus Heart, and decomP, as well as in the anthologies The Queer South (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2014) and A Shadow Map: An Anthology by Survivors of Sexual Assault (Civil Coping Mechanisms, 2017). Her work was nominated by Broad! for a Pushcart Prize, was a semifinalist in the 2018 Crab Creek Review Poetry Prize, a semifinalist in the 2018 Red Wheelbarrow Poetry Prize, and was awarded the 2018 Rita Dove Poetry Prize by the Center for Women Writers. This year, she was awarded fellowships from Brooklyn Poets and Writers in Paradise. You may find her interview as a Brooklyn Poets Poet of the Week at http://brooklynpoets.org/poet/annie-virginia/.

Engage With Us:

Fund the Wave

The Seventh Wave is a 501(c)(3) arts and literary nonprofit that invites writers, artists, activists, and creators to take part in a conversation surrounding the most pressing social issues of our times. Thank you to everyone who continues to donate to The Seventh Wave. We are moved by the generosity of our communities near and far. Thank you for helping us fund the arts, but really, fund artists. We look forward to what we can accomplish together this year.

Art in the space of social issues

Newsletter

Email address:

Leave this field empty if you're human:

Contact

The Seventh Wave Magazine, Inc. is a 501(c)(3) arts and literary nonprofit interested in conversations, both on and offline, about the most pressing social issues of our times. Get in touch with us if you are an artist, a thinker, an organization, or just anyone curious. info@seventhwavemag.com.